Last Resort

Review Cowardly, avaricious, annoying, territorial, deceitful, opportunistic: there aren't enough shady adjectives in the dictionary to describe the narrator of Andrew Lipstein's Last Resort. What fun! Last Resort is about a novelist who has stolen the plot of his best-selling book from a story relayed to him by an acquaintance. Now, if you read last year's The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, you'll notice that this novel has a similar, uh, plot as that one... They are both thrillers about, of all things, intellectual property. Korelitz's book was tighter and darker. Lipstein's is funnier. Both are incredibly entertaining... If Lipstein had written a less cunning book, he might have contrasted Caleb with a character who represented artistic purity, whatever that is. But everyone here sits somewhere on the grifter spectrum, including the real people (Avi, doomed woman, repressed married couple) upon whom Caleb's characters are based... In addition to a blithe streak, Caleb has a cruel streak, a petty streak and an intemperate streak, and Lipstein milks the comedy of these traits almost as well as Kingsley Amis did in Lucky Jim. ― New York Times, Editor's Choice If you've ever wondered where writers get their ideas from, Last Resort is wicked fun. If you're a writer, Last Resort is heartburn in print. Splayed across these pages is the dark terror that lurks within any creative person's breast: the embarrassing facts that might demolish the glorious claims made in the name of literary invention... A deliciously absurd comedy about literary fame. ― Ron Charles, WASHINGTON POST Lipstein gleefully scrutinizes the nature of success in an industry that runs as much on vanity as on financial gain... The book's command of contemporary-hipster details is wincingly precise. ― New Yorker Talent is rare, which is why I let out a big yippee reading Andrew Lipstein's Last Resort, one of a trio of excellent new first novels by men... Lipstein doesn't just blast chunks out of the inflated artifice of New York's literary scene, he turns his fire on the city at large too, or at least its hipster quarters, all "friendly, progressive, organic, recyclable"... There is something in Lipstein's novel that is specific to new male novelists - their conscious sensitivity about writing sex. Lipstein takes this head on. In Last Resort the novel-within-the-novel is slated online for its "male gaze". This is culturally astute (it's an accusation any man runs the risk of when he puts pen to paper, especially post #MeToo) and a smart way for Lipstein to say: I get it. ― The Times You won't read a more brilliantly executed literary romp this year... An unsparing satire of a generation of millennials who fear that their lives lack gravitas and emotional depth ― The Guardian A funny, fast-paced literary satire. ― Daily Telegraph A novel of post-collegiate literary ambition, slippery storytelling, and a perfectly Pninian ending. ― Vanity Fair Last Resort, Andrew Lipstein's almost perfectly plotted debut novel on a topic - creative envy and artistic theft - that tastes like catnip to many readers of literary fiction . . . has one of the best endings in recent memory... You'll think about Last Resort for weeks after you read the last pages. ― Los Angeles Times This is a moral drama about ambition and authorship that's as funny and fast-paced as it is sharp and cutting. ― Monocle A blissfully wicked work of art... A lightning-streak of a novel. ― Interview So horribly delicious that the reader (especially the reader who is also a writer) won't even dream of looking away. ― LitHub, Most Anticipated Books of 2022 If Less by Andrew Sean Greer left a hole in your life, good news: Last Resort will fill it. Fast and funny, it feels like a backstage pass to the book world. ― Meg Mason, author of SORROW AND BLISS I loved Last Resort. It takes so many surprising and brilliant turns: it is fun and witty, and rollicks through the pains and joys of writing and having yo